The huge increase in telecommunication-based commerce has led to the development of call centers to handle telephone calls. A call center is a centralized office where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an organization, usually with some amount of computer automation. Typically, a call center has the ability to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, to screen calls and forward them to appropriate personnel, and to log calls. Call centers are used by a wide variety of organizations, such as mail-order catalog companies, telemarketers, computer product help desks, and any large organization that uses the telephone to sell or service products and services. Businesses can even service internal functions through call centers, such as help desks, retail financial support, and sales support.
A call center is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call center agents, with work stations that include computers and phones for each agent. The call center can be independently operated or networked with additional centers, often linked to a corporate computer network. The voice and data pathways into the call center can be linked through a set of technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).
Many call center systems have incorporated technologies such as speech recognition and speech synthesis to allow the call center computers to handle a first level of customer support, text mining, and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Call centers can handle both inbound calls that are calls made by the consumer to obtain information, report a malfunction, or ask for help; and outbound calls where agents place calls to potential customers mostly with intentions of selling or service to the individual, such as in telemarketing applications. Call center staff are often organized into a multi-tier support system for a more efficient handling of calls. The first tier in such a model consists of operators, who direct inquiries to the appropriate department and provide general directory information. If a caller requires more assistance, the call is forwarded to the second tier, where most issues can be resolved. In some cases, there may be three or more tiers of support staff. If a caller requires more assistance, the caller is forwarded to the third tier of support; typically the third tier of support is formed by product engineers/developers or highly skilled technical support staff of the product.
Typically, in an automated call center, a caller is transferred to an agent only when the caller can no longer deal with the automated process and is very frustrated. In this case, the caller who is redirected to the human agent is already angry due to the unsuccessful experience with the automated system, and this anger can easily be transferred to the live agent. This adds to the difficulty that the agent has to deal with during the conversation, which may mean that it will not only take longer but also require more patience on the agent's side to complete the task. For example, the agent may need to listen to complaints about the system and suggestions for improvement, which all take time. Moreover, the agent must often retrace the steps that the caller already went through with the automated process. This only adds more time to the process and increases the frustration of the user.
Certain research systems using data collection under the Wizard-of-Oz framework have been developed in the field of call center implementation. The Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) approach is a method of collecting high-quality user utterances in the absence of an executable application. In this approach, a hidden human agent simulates the behavior of the dialog system such that the callers believe they are interacting with a dialog system. When using a WoZ technique to study a prototype, a human “wizard” carries out functions that would be handled by a computer in an actual deployed application. This allows a design to be evaluated without fully building the system. The technique is often used in recognition-based interfaces. Best practices in developing natural language dialog system suggest that thousands of utterances need to be collected and transcribed in order to achieve a decent coverage for speech recognition and spoken language understanding. In general, the Wizard-of-Oz approach does not scale well in terms of cost and time needed to complete the data collection, and has also been criticized for its lack of realism. Certain automated data collection systems have been developed that play an open prompt to users, gets one user utterance, then plays another prompt saying the system did not understand, gets yet another user utterance, and then transfers the call to a real human operator. This system achieves data collection at the cost of negative user experience, as the users have to repeat their requests. In addition, this system cannot be used in collecting follow-up dialogs, as they can only be used at the beginning of the conversation.
Some newly proposed Wizard-of-Oz approach data collection systems for call-routing applications have attempted to solve some of the problems associated with the above approach. For example, a customer representative works on a WoZ interface to produce machine-generated voice responses to the callers, giving users an impression of human-machine interaction, while routing the calls correctly, thus achieving real-world data collection without compromising user experiences. Such a system, however, does not allow meaningful intervention of the agent in the event of a recognition problem, nor does it provide information to the agent regarding the dialog flow.
What is needed, therefore, is a system that enables agents to access and intervene in the interaction between the automated system and the caller so as to reduce the caller's frustration. What is further needed is a system that informs the agent of the content of an automated call session so that necessary repetition by the user of the automated session is minimized.